Can Trump Close the Deal?

His supporters may not be as reliable as more upscale voters, but their numbers are still impressive.

Everyone except Kasich is in Iowa, so I’m returning home to shovel snow for a few days. Last night, I went to a Trump rally in Strafford county, town of Farmington, population less than 7,000. Trump manages to fill a high school gymnasium (maybe 800 people) in a town 35 miles from the nearest highway. (The only comparable in size event I’ve seen was a Hillary rally in Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city. As with previous Trump rallies, I am struck by the middle American, blue-collar normalness of the crowd. There is a short video here. A full range of ages, equally divided between women and men (a contrast to Hillary rallies where the ratio seems closer to 2-1). This demographic—“uncredentialed white people” in Mickey Kauss’s good phrase, have been singled out for the short end of the stick. Declining wages, declining life expectancies. If it was happening to any other group, it would be deemed a national crisis.

But people are cheerful here this evening. You have to park about 600 yards away, and make your way through the snow, but no one seems to mind. A few days prior, Byron York published an interesting story about interviewing state Republican luminaries at a political event last Saturday. Not only were none of them for Trump, but in most cases they claimed to not even know anyone who was for Trump. Considering these are people who make their living in politics, and that Trump holds a substantial lead in all the their state’s polls, this is a breathtaking admission.

With this in mind, I went around asking people before the event if they planned to vote for Trump (more than half said yes, no one said no) and what was their estimate of how many people in this crowd would get out and actually cast a vote for Trump. Or do people just come for the entertainment? I asked about a dozen people. All were from the area, so I assume to some extent they know their neighbors. The estimates ranged from half to about 80 percent, the median probably about 60 percent.

My guess is that a political scientist would consider that soft support, and it’s a pretty safe bet that the turnout will be lower here than amongst those attending a Jeb Bush town hall (where everyone is very nice, and “credentialed”). On that basis, I predict Trump would perform less well than his polls on election day, but not overwhelmingly so.

I’ve seen Trump speak three times now, and have grown tired of the basic speech. That doesn’t mean that those at the event were similarly restless, though the whole show seems very much toned down. The only real zest in it is when he’s going after Ted Cruz (“The Canadian,” someone yelled out). I wonder when he will begin to fill out what he can actually do to make America better, besides not hiring “idiots,” or making sure we have the “best people” negotiating for us. It would be nice if some of the best people were actually advising him now. I’ve made it clear before that I think Trump’s basic instincts in foreign and domestic policy are very good; his independence from the neoconservative or business oriented Beltway think tanks is as felicitous as his independence from their campaign contributions. I’m not sure when evoking General Patton and General MacArthur ceases to suffice, for any voter, as an meaningful indication of foreign policy direction.

Then again, what audiences hear from other candidates is hardly better, even if it is more detailed. Jeb Bush manages to say, in one five minute span, that we need show respect for Muslims in order to fight ISIS and that we will move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby signaling our acquiescence to Israel’s unilateral claim to the Holy City. (There is a reason, Jeb, why no previous president has done this.)

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8 Responses to Can Trump Close the Deal?

You say Trump’s policy instincts are “basically good,” and superficially you may be right. But why do you believe any of that is sincere on his part, when most of what he does is yammer on about how great he is.

“Strong in numbers (though not a majority), awakening to a new sense of anger and endangerment, Jacksonians are still groping for a movement and a program.
What we are seeing in American politics today is a Jacksonian surge. It is not yet a revolution on the scale of Old Hickory’s movement that transformed American politics for a generation. Such a revolution may not be possible in today’s America, and in any case the current wave of Jacksonian activism and consciousness is still in an early and somewhat incoherent phase…

“Donald Trump, for now, is serving as a kind of blank screen on which Jacksonians project their hopes. Proposing himself as a strong leader who ‘gets’ America but is above party, Trump appeals to Jacksonian ideas about leadership… Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy, it now seems clear that Jacksonian America is rousing itself to fight for its identity, its culture and its primacy in a country that it believes it should own. Its cultural values have been traduced, its economic interests disregarded, and its future as the center of gravity of American political life is under attack.”

Mead’s comment about “supporting Israel almost reflexively” is, I think, mainly a reference to a small minority of dispensationalist fundamentalists among those he calls “uncredentialed white people.” Also, Mead’s reference to “resisting diplomacy with Iran and North Korea…supporting Guantanamo, [and being] willing to use ‘enhanced interrogation’ against terrorists in arms against the United States” are the weak, residual leaning of another minority in this group toward some of the worst foreign policy failings of the Bush II years. Nevertheless on the whole the Mead article seems a fair characterization of the demographic he calls “uncredentialed white people” and is worth a read.

You wrote, Scott: “I’ve seen Trump speak three times now, and have grown tired of the basic speech. That doesn’t mean that those at the event were similarly restless, though the whole show seems very much toned down.” Do you sense that this seemingly “toned down,” cautious approach bears some similarity to the approach of a team with a three-touchdown halftime lead that thinks it can put aside scoring anymore and instead play a containment defense for the rest of the game? Or so you think that Trump is just pacing his campaign his campaign for the long haul to November?

Between July 1 and Sept. 30, Trump’s campaign says it received 73,942 unsolicited donations, pumping $3.8 million into his campaign coffers. The average contribution was about $50, and 71 percent of the money came from donors giving less than $200. Trump contributed $100,779 to his campaign during that time, although he adds that he has spent $1,909,576 of his own money since launching the campaign in June.

I think The Donald is a cynic. I think that his angry Tweets and controversial comments are far more planned than our political analysts think-certainly the Palin introduction was. (He knew liberal journalists couldn’t resist that bone, right when they were about to take him seriously as a threat. Now they are going to spend a couple of weeks going into pious scoffing, waxing at length about the inbreeding in the Palin family, that will cement his hold on the Great Unwashed.) He knows how the media works better than anybody.

Whether he really believes anything he says or not is really only known to him. But I will say this: while Trump lies all the time, so do the majority of his opponents, if less explicitly. Trump’s merely just blowing it up, to the point where you can almost think that he’s doing it for satirical purposes. This isn’t a good reason to support Trump, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there is a serious element of the “middle finger” in Trump’s support.

And that’s a very important selling point to the white working class. He’s got his own money and is beholden to no special interests other than his own mouth. He’s free to tell fellow plutocrats (Adelson) or Karl Rove or Krauthammer to go to hell. And he does.

How is it possible that the whole “I don’t know anyone who voted for (supports) him” cliche is still a thing? Are these people that unwilling to admit that they talk to the common folk only when telling them how they want their hedges trimmed?

Sure, it’s just Scott McConnell standing in the middle of a big gym crowd, filming randomly. But I, too was “struck by the middle American, blue-collar normalness of the crowd…A full range of ages, equally divided between women and men…[In the] town of Farmington, population less than 7,000, Trump manages to fill a high school gymnasium (maybe 800 people) in a town 35 miles from the nearest highway…People are cheerful here this evening. You have to park about 600 yards away, and make your way through the snow, but no one seems to mind.”

It’s these little details that add so much to one’s understanding of a movement in its earliest stages.

No matter how this election campaign ends, I think that something very important may have begun.

Yes, turnout could be Trump’s Achilles heel, especially in caucus states. Remember that “straw polls” at a caucus mean nothing; to help your candidate, you need to:
1. Show up on caucus night,
2. Stick around after the straw poll,
3. Either get elected delegate yourself, or make sure as many of the delegates as possible support your candidate.
That’s one entire evening; then more time as you go through the various levels of party conventions.
Trump’s support seems wide enough; is it deep enough?